The Exchange: Elizabeth Stuckey-French on the Radioactive Lady

Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s new novel, “The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady,” is the sort of book that one devours quickly and then thinks, “I’ll have another just like that, please.” The trouble, of course, is that it’s difficult to find another book quite like this one. The plot is cheerfully absurd: Marylou Ahearn, a seventy-seven-year-old woman still grieving over her daughter’s death, from cancer, decades ago, plans to murder the scientist who gave her a “radioactive cocktail” to drink during her pregnancy in the nineteen-fifties. Marylou moves to Tallahassee, Florida, to commit the ultimate act of revenge, only to find that the scientist, Dr. Spriggs, is now a doddering old man who lives with his daughter’s family and doesn’t remember much about the past. Rather than killing him right away, she decides instead to get at him by torturing his family members—the harried, menopausal daughter, the dallying son-in-law, the grandchildren with Asperger’s Syndrome.

So much that happens in this book is wildly improbable—we encounter at various points a massive hurricane, a nuclear reactor built in a backyard, and a crafty pedophile—but un-fantastical, deadpan prose grounds even the zaniest plot elements in everyday realism. Even as we laugh, we’re moved to wonder how our own uniquely dysfunctional families might react in such circumstances.

Earlier this week, Stuckey-French and I exchanged e-mails about radioactive ladies, dark humor, and the perils of motherhood; an edited version of our conversation appears below.

There’s something wonderfully un-categorizable about “The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady.” Many of the characters—Marylou, especially, but others as well—are at least somewhat despicable, and yet we find ourselves sympathizing with and even loving them. It’s very funny, but the humor comes from grim situations we know we shouldn’t laugh at. Which authors have you looked to as models for this kind of darkly humorous tone?

Darkly comic novels are my favorite. The Irish writer William Trevor walks the line between funny and awful so well. I’m thinking in particular of his novel “The Children of Dynmouth,” in which a budding sixteen-year-old psychopath terrorizes a seaside town in England because everyone either feels sorry for him or is titillated by or terrified of his bad manners. It’s the sort of book you almost feel guilty for finding amusing. Another novel in this vein is “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” by Muriel Spark, about a narcissistic teacher in a girls’ school in Edinburgh who wreaks havoc in the lives of her young charges. Many North Americans write this way too—Flannery O’Connor, Tobias Wolff, Richard Bausch, Alice Munro—but acknowledging the thin line between pathetic and humorous is perhaps a naturally British way of viewing the world, which could explain why I gravitate toward their literature.

I was surprised and disturbed to learn that the medical experiment described in the book is based on something that actually happened. How did you first learn about it?

I found out about these experiments when I stumbled upon Eileen Welsome’s book “The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War” at my local library. Welsome’s book, which began as a series of articles in the Albuquerque Tribune, exposed the abuses of patients kept secret by government scientists for almost fifty years. These scientists invited orphans at the Fernald State Asylum in Massachusetts to join a science club and then, unbeknownst to the orphans, laced their breakfast oatmeal with radioactive iodine. In Nashville, doctors caring for low-income pregnant women gave them prenatal vitamin drinks that were actually radioactive “cocktails.” Many of these unsuspecting guinea pigs and their children developed health problems, including cancer. Even though Welsome won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting, neither I nor most people I talked to had heard the story. I wanted people to know about it. Part of my motivation was personal. In my early twenties I developed thyroid cancer, which most medical experts think is caused by radiation exposure, perhaps from dental x-ray machines or radioactive fallout drifting east from Nevada. I felt I had something in common with the subjects in the experiments.

Even aside from the “radioactive cocktails” there’s a lot of science in this novel! Particularly impressive are all the details about Otis’s home-grown reactor. Did you teach yourself nuclear physics, or just make it all up?

I didn’t know squat about it till I started researching for this book, though I’ve always found nuclear science fascinating. Much of my information about the breeder reactor came from a book by Ken Silverstein called “The Radioactive Boy Scout.” This book is the true account of a high school student in Michigan, who, during the nineteen-seventies, without the knowledge of friends or family, built a model breeder reactor in his backyard shed and contaminated his neighborhood. He found out where to get the right materials by posing as a science teacher and wrote letters to “experts” who readily answered his questions. In addition to Silverstein’s book, I also bought copies of some of the books from the fifties that inspired the Radioactive Boy Scout and I read about breeder reactors online. But in order to comprehend the mechanics well enough to write about it, I finally had to draw my own rudimentary diagrams of how such a small reactor might work. I also had fabulous assistance from my Doubleday copy editor/fact-checker who helped me immensely with all things radioactive, especially the ways in which radiation is measured.

How and at what point in your process did you decide to write the chapters from different characters’ points-of-view? Which were the easiest to write? The hardest?

Originally, the entire novel was written in Vic’s (the father’s) voice, and all the stuff about the nineteen-fifties experiments was safely in the past. Once I realized that I needed to bring the past into the present in the person of Marylou Ahearn, the Radioactive Lady, I knew I had to give her, and Dr. Spriggs, and each member of the Witherspoon family, their own chapters. Marylou’s voice I never hesitated with. She just jumped up and started yakking away. I was most nervous about the getting inside the minds of the teen-agers with Asperger’s, because, not having it myself, I felt I’d be presumptuous taking on such a persona. But I do have a daughter with Asperger’s and I’ve been around countless kids, teen-agers, and adults with the syndrome, so I convinced myself that I was only going to experiment, and if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t put those chapters in. It not only worked, but as I was writing it I felt extremely liberated, because, as my daughter so rightly pointed out to me, people with Asperger’s may share traits but they certainly are not all alike. Duh.

On some level, this seems to be a book about motherhood—about the protective instinct and the rage it can inspire, about feelings of guilt and fatigue, and ultimately about love. I imagine that you drew on your own experiences as a mother, but I also suspect that some scenes (like the ones involving pedophilia!) might be troubling for a parent to write. True?

Very true! And a very astute observation. Yes, it’s all about the mixed bag of parenthood. I’m always telling my students to write about what you most fear, especially the things that you instinctively shy away from. So I set out to do that in this book. I have two teen-age daughters, and like any parent I’m constantly worrying about them. One of them is on the “autism spectrum” and one is considered “typical,” and one of the weirdest things about this situation is that it becomes yet another way for the two of them to compete. And of course it’s a ripe opportunity for parental conflict and guilt. So in the “Radioactive Lady,” I took some of my worst fears, projected them into the future and tried to write my way through them and come out on the other side still standing. I have a feeling I’m still not done with some of these issues.

Both “Radioactive Lady” and “Mermaids on the Moon” take place in Florida. Does it bug you that people might label you as a “Florida” or “Southern” writer?

Not at all. I’m honored. I’m a Midwesterner because my father happened to get a teaching job at Purdue when I was five and we settled in Indiana for the long haul, but my parents were from the South, and we visited the Deep South often when I was growing up. I feel very much at home here. Many Panhandle and Gulf Coast residents are originally from the Midwest—they announce themselves in droves whenever I wear my University of Iowa sweatshirt. I love Florida and will no doubt set another book here, but I’m planning to go back to the Midwest for my next project.